My mother comes from a family of mostly professional people. There were lawyers, court clerks and plenty of ministers in her family. In those days, however, people had to have practical skills as well as a profession. Although her father was an attorney, their family kept a cow to provide milk for the family. Her mother proved up a homestead as a way of becoming a land owner. There are plenty of family stories of ministers who were also fine gardeners and others who had many different skills.

On my father’s side of the family, preceding generations were primarily farmers. They possessed mechanical skills because it was required to do the work of the farm. They got good at working with animals, because they worked the land with teams before there were tractors that were practical for such work.

Most of what I have learned about furniture repair, however, didn’t come from my family at all. I learned it from the elders of my wife’s family. She had an uncle who had done a considerable amount of refinishing furniture and making light repairs. Her grandfather caned chairs and that skill was passed down to her father and I picked up the skill from observing both men.

I suppose that there was a time when caning chairs was a job skill and that people earned their living handcrafting the seats of chairs. These days, however, there really aren’t all that many opportunities to use the skill. Since the late 1950’s most furniture with caned seats have been made with sheets of cane that were woven by machines. The sheets are then set into a groove in the chair cut by a router. The cane is then held in place with another thicker piece of cane stock glued into the slot, holding the woven cane in place.

I learned to weave cane by hand in order to make seats for canoes. By setting up a jig, I can drill an even row of holes around a canoe seat and then cane it to make a lightweight and comfortable seat. Most places that sell cane webbing also sell plastic cane which is waterproof and stands up well to use in a canoe. Several years ago I purchased a large roll of plastic cane that will probably last the rest of my life for all of the canoes that I wish to build or restore. And, when restoring canoes I now sometimes use cane webbing that is machine woven as such was used in most canoes from the 1960’s on.

Once in a while I get the opportunity to weave cane for a chair that a family member or friend has. On our way home from our recent vacation I picked up a chair that belongs to Susan’s sister that is in need of a new seat. I’m not as quick with the weaving as I once was, but I’ll have it redone within the next week, working a few minutes each evening.

When I was a seminary student, I learned the technique for making chair seats with fiber rush. Fiber rush is a tough twisted paper that is used for weaving the seats of chairs that have four rungs. I was serving as janitor in a church that had individual chairs with rushed seats in the sanctuary - about 300 of the chairs. The paper rush was worn from years of use and I began to replace the bottoms in a few of the chairs. The task was so big that I organized a class and taught others to make the repairs, using chairs from the sanctuary for teaching and then recruiting students to do additional chairs. Before having its seat re-done each chair had to have the old material removed, have all of the joints re-glued and the wood oiled to make the chair look good. Occasionally I had to replace dowels or make other repairs to the chairs as well. Over the course of a year we were able to get new seats in all of the chairs in that church. When I visited the church about 20 years later they were still using the chairs. I suspect, however, that they have long since been replaced by now.

The craft of furniture repair isn’t a necessary skill in a world of kit furniture and household furnishings that are not designed to last for multiple generations. A fair amount of the furniture in our home came from preceding generations, but that is rare even for people of our age. We have a storage unit that contains some very good and usable furniture that we got from our elders and for which we can find no home in the present generation. Our children’s homes aren’t really designed to be showplaces for antiques. I don’t know what will become of the old furniture, but perhaps some of it can find homes where it will be treasured for a few more years.

I have all of the caning supplies that I need at this point in my life, although I may need to buy another coil of chair cane at some point in the future if I find opportunity to cane enough chairs. For some reason, however, i took a look at the web to see if supplies are still available last night. They are. But I found other things that surprised me. In addition to chair cane, the web site sells caning pegs and wedges and a caning tool. I had never though of those things as objects that one would buy. I make my pegs by sharpening bits of dowel. The chair I am currently caning was previously caned by using golf tees as caning pegs. I know because the person who did the job would break off the tee in the hole and then add a bit of elmer’s glue to secure the ends of the cane instead of tying it off the way I learned to do. It never occurred to me that one might buy such an object rather than just make it. The same applies to wedges. They are just pieces of hardwood cut into a wedge shape. And a caning tool is a handle with two pieces of dowel in the end.

I guess I should be heartened to know that there are others who still cane chairs and that the skill will continue on into another generation. I had been wondering who I might recruit to teach the skill so that it would survive me. Perhaps I should also be on the lookout for someone that I could teach to carve pegs and make simple tools. Those skills seem also to be disappearing.

In the meantime, I’ve got a chair to finish and if I do it right it will last longer than I will.

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